yes and podcast June 5, 2026 43 min

Why AI is an employer branding problem, and why you should listen to HR

Most work conversations spend half the time pushing back. This one spent all of it building.

This is the first episode of Yes And, a new conversation series from Yes Please Studio, where I sit down with people I respect and we build on each other's thinking instead of competing with it.

My guest is Emma Jackson, a people and culture specialist with 25 years of local, regional, and international experience, spanning the early days of Google, big pharma, the humanitarian sector, and most recently her own consultancy in Oslo, where she helps scale-ups join the dots between strategy and delivery through inclusive people strategies. Emma was born in New Zealand to British parents and has spent almost her whole adult life abroad, landing in Norway 15 years ago after a sliding-door moment on a long-haul flight.

Emma and I met a few weeks ago at the Splash Careers Unconvention, and within ten minutes we realized we were circling the same problem from two different sides. Her side is employer branding. Mine is change management. The thesis we kept coming back to: those are two sides of the same coin. Your employer brand is the sum of every change you've put your people through, and change management is that brand in motion.

We get into why this AI moment is really a change problem wearing a technology costume. Most companies are treating it as a tooling question when it's a people question, and the fear that comes with it is real. As Emma puts it, the brain reads fear and excitement in nearly the same way, so the distance between "this is exciting" and "this is terrifying" is shorter than we think. The work is closing that distance.

In this episode

  • Why "going 100 km/h in the wrong direction" is the real risk of the AI rush, and why it pays to take a beat first
  • The 2% / 98% split in AI adoption, and why the 98% is the part worth paying attention to
  • The five levers any change needs to actually land: tools, skills, training, arenas, and expectations, and what breaks when one of them is missing
  • Agency, curiosity, and the humility to admit you don't know what you don't know
  • The credibility gap between the employer brand you aspire to and where you actually are
  • Why respect, shown through honesty, timing, and being available, is the throughline under all of it

A few moments

What can companies do? They should listen to HR. I really do believe that, because HR is the people-centric function. So many companies are missing a trick here. They're losing competitive advantage as a result. They're losing loyalty. They're losing talent. They're losing productivity.

Emma Jackson

We're talking about two sides to the same coin, because the flip side of employer branding is change management. Most companies are treating AI adoption like a tooling problem, when it's really a change management problem. It's really an employer branding problem. How do you equip the people to do the best work, and define what that best work is.

Eric Stein-Beldring

Find us

Find Emma on LinkedIn: emmajacksonconsulting.

Whether you're leading a startup or a multinational, you'll leave with something you can use the next day or talk through with your team. And if you're sitting in this exact spot and you're not sure where to start, write in. I'd love to hear about it.